Once you've gathered your necessities, it's time to get started. It's available to anyone, no matter what brand drive you have, so if your drive manufacturer doesn't offer a migration tool, Macrium Reflect is your next best bet. Just download the installer for the free home version and run through the wizard to get it up and running on your PC. Western Digital and SanDisk users can use WD's version of Acronis True Image to copy their data using these instructions.įor this guide, we'll be using Macrium Reflect-it's a free drive-cloning tool that works with any brand of hard drive and SSD. For example, if you bought a Samsung SSD, we recommend downloading Samsung Data Migration and following the instructions in the user guide. If your drive manufacturer offers a migration program, that might be your best bet. There are many different drive-cloning tools on the market, and unfortunately there's no free, one-size-fits-all option. (Again, desktop users may not need this if they have room for two drives inside their PC-you can just install it internally alongside your old hard drive.) If you're using a laptop with only one hard drive slot, that means you'll need an external adapter, dock, or enclosure that can connect your bare SSD to your computer over USB. Orico Hard Drive Docking Stationĭuring this process, you'll need both your SSD and your old hard drive connected to your computer at the same time. In that case, you could store Windows and your programs on the SSD while putting your music, movies, and other media on a second, larger hard disk-though this can be a bit more complicated, as we'll discuss below. The only exception is if you're on a desktop computer and have room for multiple hard drives. If you have a 500GB hard drive now, you should probably spring for a similarly sized SSD (or larger, to accommodate future data). Make sure to buy the right form factor for your computer (some laptops will use 2.5-inch drives, while others might use M.2 or mSATA drives), and get one big enough to fit all your data. We have some recommendations, but if you're on a budget, we have a separate list of cheap SSDs as well.
Obviously, in order to upgrade to an SSD, you'll need to, well, buy an SSD.
You could reinstall Windows from scratch, and in some situations, that may be preferable-but with the right tools, you can get up and running much quicker by copying your entire drive over to the new SSD. It'll boot faster, programs will launch instantly, and games won't take so long to load anymore. Swapping it out for a solid-state drive (SSD) is one of the best upgrades you can make in terms of speeding up your computer. If you're still using a traditional, spinning hard disk on your PC, you're missing out.
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